About Me

Monday, 6 May 2013

Changing Tracks

The BBC has
been rerunning “The Likely Lads” from the early 1970’s and the follow up to its
original 60’s one about two teenage working lads in a provincial town living
what the BBC imagined to be the Swinging 60’s.

That ended
when Bob signed on for the Army to see the world followed by Terry. Bob was then discharged because of flat feet
leaving Terry to do his five years. The
programme of the 1970’s contrasts how the world has moved on for Bob and that
Terry returns to find that everything has changed, in his view for the worse.

For me at
the time it struck a chord. As a
teenager in the early 50’s it was at first National Service for me, one of
those who convinced the Army that it might be better to have a wholly
professional service and then a period as a student in a world of its own.

When it was
time to come to terms with the reality of the world as it was and would be and
those in it, it was a shock to realise that during this time of detachment things
had and were about to change and cheerful assumptions about the future were
entirely wrong.

This
afternoon, the “clunk” in the back of the skull occurred again reading Rowan
Bosworth-Davies, rowans-blog of 5 May 2013 titled “Lies, Damned Lies and Civil
Service Misinformation” which is self explanatory.

In a long
item, clearly and pungently written, he points out that now the offshore tax
haven based banking and financial system represents the real financial world
and that the onshore original progenitor is now simply a secondary and damaged
heritage structure perhaps doomed to extinction.

That being
the case what we like to thing of as “national” politics or policies are
essentially fictions that function because of the existence of what is left of
the nation states and their governments.
Our existing government financial arrangements accordingly cannot work
as they once did and never will again.

Thinking
back to the 1950’s we had governments and a civil service that believed that Britain was
still a workshop of the world and our experience and industrial fabric would
continue in its existing form. This
would yield the profits of capitalism which would pay for the welfare state and
all the rest.

The
realisation that we had now begun to face severe competition from across the
world who could produce goods better, cheaper and more reliably did not occur
to them and even into the 1970’s the government believed that it could direct
investment and control and fine tune the money flows.

Those who
tried to explain that the world was no longer ours to command or to influence
to any great extent were regarded as disloyal and extremists. It was strange that the Left then was even
more confident in the power of the State than the Right and doubly wrong headed
about the ability to control overseas trading.

Only this
time round all the signs are that the general public may have come to realise
that our governments are simply charades and the acts are wearing thin.

Where this
might lead to we cannot know because we have an erratic media driven government
concentrating on trivialities as the structure collapses round them.

Does anyone
remember what happened to Rootes Cars and a host of other firms like them?